Many organizations have some form of employee directory and usually have made an attempt to augment this directory with personal profile attributes such as memberships, position, title or project affiliations. Many have attempted to expand each employee's profile by adding skills inventory, educational background or professional accomplishments. Many of these efforts have been successful, but most have not fulfilled their goal. The effort required to update and maintain such a profile and a subjective nature of self-description leads to inaccuracies or stale data.
Often, people who have relevant knowledge in a particular topic are not contacted because a method to search for persons with such knowledge has not been implemented. Most such people finder systems fail due to a lack of timely updates to an employee's profile. In addition, knowledgeable workers may not consider their experience to be valuable to others and may overlook this when manually completing profile forms. The result is that many manually built expertise locator systems are irrelevant or become outdated and eventually fail.
These and other drawbacks exist.